Andy Bechtolstheim presented at GigaOm and discussed a bunch of cool topics for the data center crowd. I am going to cheat and refer to Barb Darrow's notes as I was sitting next to her during the presentation and why type when I can copy the good stuff. :-) I saw Andy a few weeks ago in NYC at the Open Compute and was curious what he would say at GigaOm Roadmap.

Bechtolsheim: AWS, open source rewrite rules for startups

Today’s tech entrepreneurs would be out of their minds to build out their own data centers rather than renting capacity from Amazon or another low-cost provider.

That wasn’t a direct quote, but it’s pretty much the takeaway from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Arista Networks(and also of Sun

Andy made the point people would be nuts to build their own data centers.

A company might build out its own infrastructure only if it’s raised a lot of venture capital, he said. But it needs to be a lot. And even then, maybe AWS is a better way. “Netflix … uses Amazon for infrastructure. Here’s the leading, largest company in a field deciding it’s cheaper and more efficient to use a competitor for infrastructure rather than building its own.”

Andy mentioned the Open Compute Project.

Bechtolsheim is also on the board of the new Open Compute Foundation, formed by Facebook to propagate specs for standard, energy-efficient data center infrastructure. OCF hopes to bring open-source innovation that so improved software tools into the hardware realm.

For those brave souls wanting to build data centers, the OCF blueprint could help. But, Bechtolsheim said, that’s for truly big companies that need to do huge webscale computing, not for startups.

Bottom Line.

For nearly every entrepreneur weighing a tech startup, it’s better to rent than to buy or build.